Stasis

stasis (from Greek στάσις "a standing still") A state of stability in which all forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel out each other.

I have a tendency to gather moss. Unless forcefully pushed I like to stay where I am, static.

I live five minutes walk away from the hospital that I was born in, 1979.
My husband was born there too, same year.
The twins were born there.
Reuben was born there.

We live close to both my parents and my husband's parents, still married, residing in the homes that my husband and I grew up in. We went to those self same houses upon our returning from the hospital, 1979. On opposite sides of town.

An accumulation of memories, different heights and weights, doorways viewed from down low and suddenly, from high. As though on stilts. Or suddenly falling to the floor and straightening up, to find that you are not quite the height that you expected.

The years grow a thick, fuzzy patina over this small circular territory of ours. London overspill. Slops.

At times, this makes me feel like a failure. Adolescent-me slaps her open palm to her forehead and sighs. Really, you are still here. Oh. My. Days. Some kind of a loser you turned out to be.

And I wonder if it was her who, when the twins were born, hissed in my ear, "well, what did you expect?"

My mother says that sometimes, when she is out walking with Jessica, she looks down and is surprised to see that her hands are old. She feels displaced in time, my mother as me, me recast as Jessica.

She is not the only one travelling through time.

I take Jessica and Reuben to the park. This is a park I remember from my own childhood. We laze on the grass with cheese and bananas and fig rolls (they tasted better in my childhood memories although Reuben appeared to like them well enough.)

There is the pale brick wall that I used to walk along the top of when I was as old as Jessica is now.
There is the park where I used to slump on the swing at fourteen, listening to Metallica cassette tapes on my friend's stereo.

And I feel a strange sense of alignment. I look at my hands and feel mildly surprise to discover that I have hands at all.


I've been thinking about this post of Josh's a great deal this week.

When you have lived in the same town your entire life, it is rather hard not to think about time.
To envisage strange patterns and rhythms. Your child sits on that spot on the stairs opposite the hallway mirror where you used to sit. And the carpet wears.
Blink, you are a child.
Blink, you are your parents.
Blink, you are your grandparents (if you're lucky).
Blink again, you are gone.

I am all of a-withering, I have stood here too long. 1979 and cassette tapes seem an unimaginably long time ago. But yet, to me, they are still present.

Everything, everyone, they are all still with me. A vast plethora of items and memories and people strung to my ankles and wrists, trailing out on strings. My daughter, she is still with me. Slung around my neck on silver. Cold, dead weight on my heart. And in the beating of my blood pulsing around my body. She is as there as she ever was. Or perhaps she is as here as she ever was.

Life and death are an irrelevancy to my tiny, mighty daughter. I feel she is still here, right up against me, that I'm still holding her in my arms as I once did, our skins touching as they did touch. Once. Just minutes ago, just years ago.

Sitting there, in that same park, I feel as though I am simultaneous. I walk along the wall, my legs at once short and tall. I slump, I smoke, I cough, I'm drunk, I'm walking past this place to the shops, I'm walking past this place to catch the bus, I'm talking to my friend about the time she tried to kill herself, I'm running, I'm playing Manhunt around the Alleys, I'm pregnant and just starting to feel two sets of movements, I'm kissing that unsuitable boy over by the swings, I'm old, old and sitting here remembering. I don't think I will remember everything perhaps. But I will remember the wall walking, maybe I'll even try it again. If I'm still around and sure footed enough. And today it feels as though I already did. My old lady self has already walked that wall, her feet matching my four year old steps.

I'm here with Jessica and Reuben and I'm 32 years old and two of my children are solid, with muscles and bones. Displacing air and time in waves around them.

And Georgina seems to be there too. With the ghosts of myself as a child and my wall walking future old lady herself. With me, just separated by time. Or maybe not. Because we are all cut so very short, on a short fuse, time ticking, time a-wasting, we are going to the earth, we are going to the skies and into trees. Who knows where we will go?

Maybe everything that falls down, eventually rises.

We are so insignificant. Tiny specks of dust on a tiny speck in a tiny place. One brief blink and we are here and gone. But, in the park, I feel that this is what sets me free.

Because if you head out far enough, three days and thirty two years overlap perfectly. And I can stop searching and just be content in the knowledge that you aren't that far away. I can rest because you are here. One insignificance to another perhaps but my heart, my heart tells me otherwise.

Who wants to be burdened with significance when you could be light, your heels hardly making divots in the earth?

Who wants to drive their foot down and down into the soil. Attempting to stamp your significance upon things that are vastly indifferent.

You could try but you are here. Then gone. Before you've hardly woken up.

And to be all of those things, people, imaginings, ghosts, spirits, memories of size and movement, shallow dents in the earth. All of these things happening at once. Shadowy and solid.

And yet to mean nothing at all? Perhaps that is not so bad. It will do.

My dear girl, how I do miss you. Oh my heart. 

Border

Guess when I am writing this post? Reuben's nap-time.
It transpires that Reuben's nap-time is actually the only time there is for writing blog posts. So I'm going to have to do a bit of back pedalling.
But it doesn't matter.

I want to write this blog as a way of marking Georgina's position in my life and in my family. Jess described writing as a type of mothering once and that has stayed with me. These words are how I mother Georgina, and they are recorded in the only place that accepts her, this strange, half lit world of the internet.

And my mothering is far from perfect.

If it were a blog, it would not be a perfect blog, full of witty remarks, accurate spelling and deep thoughts.

If I were mothering Georgina, a hypothetical living and breathing Georgina, there would be days when we would fall out. When she would get cross and upset with me, when she would punch me in the throat and I would feel she was being unreasonable. We'd fall out. She'd sit on the floor sulking and refusing to speak to me and I'd go and cry guilty tears in the kitchen. Heaven knows that Jessica and I have had days like that, cross-throat-punching-guilty-tears days.

We also have twirling-bouncing-smiling days. But even then, even then, I notice that I am sometimes gripping her shoulders a little too tightly. As though she might slip away into the dark without me. Some days those scars on her hands seem to shine at me more brightly. As my husband says so perceptively, 'Catherine, you are just not the 'getting over it' type.' And I'm not. I hope that the children don't notice.

They tuck you up your mum and dad don't you know. Except with an f rather than a t.

I will do my own fair share of tucking up. It is inevitable. 

So Georgina, Jessica and Reuben. My dear, dear loves. Please know that I am trying my best. It's not perfect, it's far from perfect. Sometimes I feel I'm only running damage limitation. Occasionally I do something I'm proud of, more often I'm left wishing that I could start over. But I can't.

Whether I'm desperately trying to figure out why you are screaming in my face (Reuben) or to figure out why you are punching me in the throat (Jessica) or trying to write you a love letter that makes some sort of sense (Georgina), I'm trying. I want it to be right, to minimise the whole tucking you up thing. But, show me a human that's never tucked up a bit? Ok ok, except for you Georgina, you never got a chance to try.

***

In real life, that hazy place, I have very few friends who have lost a baby. But strangely, I do have a friend who lost a baby under very similar circumstances to those in which Georgina died. Very early birth, survived for a few days, became sicker and eventually had life support removed, dying in the arms of his mother.

We sometimes meet, in cafes, in pubs. We often talk about the experiences that we have in common, doesn't everyone? I suppose that is the basis of most friendships, that upwards glance that says 'I recognise you. We have been in the same place, you and I."

But the experiences we have in common are difficult ones. Sometimes I catch people listening to our conversations. Once, I looked up and caught an older woman listening in. She looked repulsed and disturbed. I wanted to go over to her table and say, "Well, that is what you get for eavesdropping. Anything you would care to contribute?" But I know that I am guilty of eavesdropping myself on occasion. Even to the sacred, to the last gasps. And so I remain in my seat.

And this is where I am currently struggling. Because I have forgotten or misplaced where the border lies. Between acceptable and unacceptable. Between talking and that dread word, particularly frightening to the English perhaps, over-sharing. Even typing 'over-sharing' sends a shiver down my spine.

As  I have said in the past, I babbled on about Georgina quite happily for almost a year after she had died. Because it never crossed my mind that this was odd or might make other people think that I was crazy with a capital C.

But, somewhere along the line, I became scared of the opinion of others. The line between appropriate and inappropriate had, apparently, completely disappeared and that I've been struggling to relocate it ever since.

Now I'm not at all certain where to draw the line, in some arbitrary place that might not match up with that which is marked out by the world at large. It's particularly difficult at work, where I am putting in quite a bit of effort to maintain a professionally bland exterior. Not hard. People forget easily the Catherine W. of 2008, with her little belly. The Catherine W. of 2010 with her red eyes and frequent dashes for the office door. With that tiny, dead, cold, unspeakable weight around her heart. Still there if you look closely enough. But I don't expect them to remember those people, I'd rather that they didn't to be honest.

But now, I worry that I have over stepped. I enquired after a colleague's father's joint replacement the other day. He'd told me the story of the operation after a meeting the week previously. And he seemed disconcerted that I had asked. He twice said, "it's very kind of you to remember."

And I wondered if I have become the hovering bird of ill omen, who only remembers hospitalisations and deaths.

My exterior goes quieter and quieter. Neutralising myself into a quiet shade of beige. My make up is applied more thickly, retouched at lunch time, my clothes more carefully ironed. I only join in conversations about comparative car ugliness, division of domestic chores. Small words. Not marriage. Not babies apart from the coo-ing and congratulations that pre-2008 me was genuinely good at.

But my interior starts to roar. Compensating for all the damping down on the outside. I sit and stare out of the window and miss my girl. And I wonder what this all means.

If we are all of us sitting here, in our office, with internal roars, screams, shouts, cries. Desperately trying to stop our heads twisting off with the sheer amazement of it all.

Because now, everything seems a wonder to me, my office job, my feet on the ground, my lungs, my thirty two years of life tucked up under my heart.

Am I alone? Or are we all editing ourselves down to small words? I wish I could ask but I don't know any of my colleagues that well. Despite having sat in their close proximity for the majority of my waking hours for close to a decade.

Part of me thinks, where's the point in that? All the editing and squishing and squashing. Biting our tongues. Minding our manners.

Part of me thinks, well, life would be intolerable if we all of us went about roaring at one another all the time. Conversations about comparative car ugliness are what makes life unbearable and bearable all at once.

Sometimes I think that this place isn't where I'm supposed to be.

Promises, Promises

I, Catherine W, do solemnly promise that I will cease and desist from attempting to write, proofread (ha!) and publish whole blog posts during Reuben's morning nap.

This results in blog posts that  . . .
(a) are full of half baked ideas such as comparing life to a penguin race. Sigh.
(b) contain misspelt and/or made-up words. Such as, for instance, your's. Sigh.
(c) do not contain various essential words and/or paragraphs. Thus rendering the whole post a nonsense. If the post in its entirety is not already rendered a nonsense from the get-go, please see (a) above. Sigh.

I will try to write more slowly and let things lurk in the 'draft' section for a while instead of rushing to hit publish as soon as I've typed out the last sentence. Badly.

I've noticed that my comments are moving down scarily similar lines. I'm sorry. It makes me wince sometimes when I happen upon my own misspelled and incoherent words visited upon other innocent blogs. But my heart is in the right place, please believe me. Even if my words are often  . .  not quite right.

My blogging and commenting is often done on the basis of 'it's now or never.'
And much as you may prefer never, I do still need to come and dump out the contents of my tiny brain here. Half baked ideas and spelling errors and all.

The Penguin Race

I recently bought this toy for Jessica and Reuben.

Well, Reuben is allowed to watch it. Only Jessica is allowed to touch the penguins and woe betide anyone else caught clutching one of them.

I don't know how long the penguin race has been around for. It must be decades. I remember desperately wanting one in the 1980s. Now, over twenty years later, my dream has been fulfilled. Dreams can come true people. At last, I share a house with racing penguins.

Sadly, my dream did not include the awful, awful squawking noise that the things makes. But still, dreams always come at a price. 'Be careful of the thing you want, you'll get it,' as my grandmother used to say darkly.

The penguins hop up the steps and then skedaddle, pell mell, down the slide. There are three penguins, red, blue and black.

Jessica has scratched away the eyes of our red penguin. Her initial chants of, "weeeeeeee" and "wait for me" have been replaced by a slightly more sinister version which consists of "no eyes, no eyes" when the red penguin mounts the stairs.

I don't know what poor old Mr. Red did to deserve this fate. Perhaps he looked at her funny? Got too cocky? We'll never know.

So he now hops and slides around in the dark.

And this tortuous metaphor is finally about to reach its conclusion. You may breathe a sigh of relief.

I don't think my life is that different from the penguin race. I wish it could be more accurately represented by something elegant or charming. But . . . it feels somehow right that my life boils down to a cheap, plastic toy. That makes hideous squawking noises.

We can't all have grand lives. Some of us are just stuck being penguins in a eternal race that is never won or lost. We can't even change our position in the running order. We race. Until our batteries give out. And if we're lucky we get to keep the stickers that represent our eyes.

I have a feeling that me and Old No Eyes Red aren't that different. When I see him hopping and sliding gaily away, blindly, I have a pang of fellow feeling. Because I'm doing the same, hopping and sliding. Sometimes it's scary, sometimes it's plain boring and sometimes, just sometimes, it's exhilarating. To slide down into the dark, plummeting, wondering if something will change this time.

If we'll be snatched up and have our eyes have scratched off for instance? Like Mr. Red.

We might go whizzing down breathlessly expecting things, two babies for example. And something terrible and strange will happen and our expectations will be stretched and twisted. We'll get to the end of the race and we'll have only one. Or none at all.

But regardless, we'll soon be hopping up those stairs once again. There is no help for it. Because the race doesn't end at that point. Your eyes might be scratched off. Your baby might have died. But that darn penguin race, well, it simply doesn't care. Up you hop, once again.

Or perhaps, perhaps, something good will happen on this particular slide down?
I'm not going to rule it out. Not yet.

Dance Me To The End

We are dancing in the kitchen on Friday evening. I've left it too late to start cooking dinner and the children are grumpy. So I am trying to distract them from their growling stomachs and my own time mismanagement.

The music is Rimsky Korsakov's 'Flight of the Bumblebee' and our dance features Reuben as the eponymous bumble bee, chubby in bright blue stripes. Hovering, held up by my arms. He flies at Jessica, diving. Bzzzzzzzzzz. No sting though. Just a smile.

"No, no, Bay Reub" she shrieks. Delightedly.

The music changes. Something calmer. We are exhausted with our buzzing and swooping. I pick them both up, a feat that I will not be able to manage for very much longer.

We rest for a minute, three. I feel muscular and towering, one arm wrapped around each. So full, it feels as though there could not possibly be room for a third. And, for a moment, she is forgotten. My dear ashen baby daughter. She pales away to nothing. Nothing at all. And I don't know if I should feel guilty or if, for once, I am doing the right thing.

Then Jessica leans in, up close to my face. "Wake up Mummy," she says.

I wonder if she knows more than she lets on. That girl of mine. I wonder if that is what she has been trying to tell me all along.

"Wake up."

******

Increasingly I feel as though I am developing a very thin, tough surface. It has a high gloss finish. It is painted with enquiring, concerned eyes and a cheery grin. Sometimes that smile is genuine, at others, a rictus. I feel as though I am some sort of bizarre human shaped pinata. A small person trapped inside a large construction of papier mache, which I am furiously plastering away at from the inside.

Whack! Cue furiously internal plastering.
Whack! More furious internal plastering.
Fix. Fix.
Because I will not allow myself to be shattered.
That glossy surface has been hard won.
That cheery grin and concerned expression didn't come for free.
I will go to great lengths to maintain them.

Sometimes I catch the eye of a stranger on the street and think I see their own internal maintenance person flurrying about. Perhaps we should just knock heads with one another and see what falls out?

I am awake my love. My dear bird girl. Can you not see how hard I am working?
Of course you can't. I do hope you can't.
That's why I'm trying so hard, faster and faster, so that cracks will not develop on my shiny, smiling surface.

I don't contain sweets and toys. Sadly. I only wish I did. Then people could whack me and cool, fun things would fall out. Then I wouldn't mind being hit. Slings and arrows, step on down. You will only result in sweet and toys around these parts.

But rather, I only contain strange things. Not necessarily sad things. Or not only sad things, not any more. Just things that don't seem to want to shift. The jumper that I wore on the day that the twins were born lies on my floor. I still own it. I still wear it. Currently it is discarded, waiting to be added to the laundry basket.
I can't wear the T shirt I wore when I held Georgina as she was dying, that is in her box.
But the jumper?
It's there, being bright blue and attention seeking, on the floor, being just ever so slightly disconcerting.
Tempting me back there. Come on, dwell a little, try to remember. You know you want to.

And curious things. Things with long, thin fingers and large knuckles. Things that peer and poke and wonder. That is what you would get tumbling out if you managed to split my surface.

Curiouser and curiouser.
Muddled up with ironed clean sheets and numbers and poems written by only one poet.
A vast collection of unread books, a bewildered glance and an exasperated sigh.
But mainly, for the most part, the curious.

So I stumble down passageways, chasing these curious things, where they lead I don't know.
To the afterlife?
To meaning?
To nothing?
I don't know.
It's a recurrent theme, ignorance.
I'm sure that would come tumbling out, en masse, out of the Catherine W shaped pinata.
Should you choose to whack it a bit?
Enquiry and a blank answer. A useless combination.

But I hear the soft footfalls of my lost daughter.
She is racing ahead of me. She treads quickly and surefooted-ly through this murky place.
She is not human. Never was. Not really. And certainly not now.
Full of light and knowledge. So quick. She is laughing. She is delighted.

Her mother stumbles behind. Heavy. I trip. I say, "Wait. Please wait."
But she's gone.

I hear an echo.
"I know mama. I know. Wake up."

I am trying. My dear girls, I am trying.

Must You Go?

Never one for the grande passion, she preferred the emotional shallows.

Not for her the coup de foudre.
The ardent blaze.

Not for her the histrionics,
The torrid underbelly of yearning.

No hysteria.
Except for when her daughter died.

Whatever drives the tempest?
It was that.
That she lacked.

Her emotions were neat and small with carefully folded corners.
Bland. Cautious.
With caveats dangling from them.
Just in case.

She admired women with pixie cuts and flashing eyes.
Fearless with quick wits.
But she herself had long straight hair that hung, spinelessly.
Much like the head that it was attached to.

But she was fond.
Fond.
There was something that she could do.
Be fond.

So fond that she ached.

"Must you go?" she asked.
"Must you?"

And all her mild love hung suspended in the air.
Pale milky globules. Useless.

"I enjoyed your company. Must you go?"

It was a rhetorical question.

The gate is strait and the way is narrow.
No matter where it leads.

It can only accommodate single file.

One.

All fondly grasping hands must release here.

One.

Not two. Not even one and a fraction.

Whatever fraction of a person Georgina may be.
Or perhaps she is one. A whole one. Unity. 

"Must you go?"

"Yes, I must."

Written, almost in direct opposition to, Antonia Fraser's book of the same name about her relationship with Harold Pinter. Their flames. My own ashes. A beginning and an ending.

I haven't read it. I just liked the title. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I resigned from my job last week. The job that I have worked in for the past nine years. That I started when I left university. When I got engaged, when I got married, when I fell pregnant with the twins, when the twins were born, when the twins were alive, when Georgina died, when Jessica lived, when I fell pregnant with Reuben. The job with the toilets. I've always had my job. No matter what else. Like a strange numerical spine. Composed of crunching the life events of others into vertebrae.

And now it's gone. I have another. But I'm sad to leave.

Whilst doing a bit of a file tidy up, I found a picture, taken at work in 2007. That distant land. I've cropped it so I don't end up publishing photographs of my innocent colleagues on the internet.

But this photograph. Gave me pause.This photograph is of . . . . me? Me holding a helium balloon with confetti on my desk? Really? Strange. It was only taken five years ago.

I've been trying to write a summary of who am I now. A bit of variation on the 'right where I am' post. But it's hard to summarise the differences between the person in the photograph and the person I am now. So much has changed. It is a little like trying to disentangle what they call in my line of work 'inherent variation' - the level of 'statistical noise' within a system - and that which is 'unwarranted' - which indicates that something untoward is going on. Otherwise known as special cause variation. I try to imagine me aged five years onward, without Georgina dying. With no unwarranted variation, no special cause. Just older, a 32 year old me with no dead child, still no knowing what the acronym NICU stands for. And I have no idea what that person would be like.

I am different. I am older. I would have looked older if Georgina hadn't died. If, in some strange alternative world, I'd just had two normal, healthy pregnancies resulting in two children.

I am 32, not 27. I'm around 10lbs heavier. I have crows feet around my eyes and bags underneath them. Nobody is going to buy me a drink in a bar. Maybe through charity. I'm a mother of three, two daughters, one son. I am hunched from carrying a splintery, grey bundles of grievances around with me. I have a golden, spiky happiness that digs claws into my heart. I have a pain in one knee that wasn't there before. I don't know what I'm doing. 

At 27 I felt like a fool. 

At 32, I know I am a fool. 

From largely unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. And it's only taken me five year to make the progress.

I am bewildered. More bewildered now than I ever was five years ago. Looking back, looking forward. Even simply just looking around this present day. Dumb, staring, slack jawed bewilderment. My epitaph - 'Here lies Catherine W, she was bewildered.' Or possibly that should read, 'she was Bewildered.'

I look at this woman and I think, "who the hell are you?" Five year is a long time. I would quite like to go back and say, "Hey. You. Bubblehead. Look out." Or, "Winter is coming." Or simply, "duck."

As if ducking could have helped.

And I have a horrible feeling that 'Catherine W aged 38' will think the exact same thing about the me of today as I write this. So, for the record, from me at 38 to me at 32, "Hey. You. Bubblehead. Look out." Because I don't know what is coming yet. But it's in the post, something good, something bad, all wrapped up in mystery packaging and with no tracking number. And I will probably, inevitably, be underprepared.

At 27, I thought that the person I would become was a matter of my choosing. I think I fancied myself a  existentialist. Probably a fairly facile one as I'm certain my understanding is limited. At 32, I feel as though I am hardly a person at all. Just a rock, the left overs of environmental processes, wind and rain batter away at me and I'm just the scraps.

I think about Georgina all the time. I don't remember what I thought about before I thought about her. Sometimes I feel certain that my brain was full of philosophy and literature. At others, I feel certain that my brain was full of diet plans and mascara. It was probably somewhere in the middle. It was most likely a strange mishmash of both.

And I think about all different Georginas. As though she has been put through a fractional distillation column. My many Georginas, my many babies, my many first borns. Ghost upon ghost. Heated up and evaporated. Rising up to meet me.

I think about the little baby that she was, the blue eyes that she had, the hand that squeezed my finger, the body that I held. The body that was burnt to the ashes that I had keep in my wardrobe.

I think about the daughter that she could have been, the toddler, the teenager, the young woman. Sometimes indistinct, wishful thinking, wistful thinking. Sometimes I think I see something sharp. Viewed through a very small lens. Like a pin hole, refracting back very bright sunlight. The person that the first fraction would have become, the fraction I grasped briefly, had that initial distillation not been set aside.

And Georgina, the mystery. The mystery. Of why? Why?
Why was her life so short?
Why her?
Why me?
Who was she?
Who was that?

And these lines come to me.

and he walked straight in. It was where he had come from
and something told him the way to behave
He raised his hand and blessed his home
and the truisms flew and perched on his shoulders
And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.*

Because I do return to where I have come from. From ignorance to ignorance.  My own closed eye pressed up against my own closed eye in a mirror. It's a recurring image in my thoughts. Ignorance meeting ignorance. Or perhaps my eyes are screwed up against the world I now no longer want to see?

Because what I thought as a child . . well, I still think now. How do they stand up, all those grown ups? How can they carry all those bags and heavy coats? How do they stand up with all those grievances on their backs, digging splinters into their backs, knowing that death is coming? Why do they not all run mad?

But I didn't see the golden spiky creatures, clawing at around about heart level.
And I didn't realise that those trite phrases, the truisms that once so annoyed me, that seemed to duck the issues. They are all that is propping us up. Some of us, tall as trees to my child eyes, are held up by the explanations my parents once extended to me.

It is what it is. Life isn't fair. Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.

Circularity. The tree sprouts.

And sometimes that is a comfort. And sometimes it is bitter. That this is . . . all there is?

It is what it is.

* These words are taken from The Truisms by Louise MacNeice. I promise I do read other poets. Very occasionally.